Chris Self

If you are among the many who have been sitting on the proverbial fence of whether or not to buy a home now or later, we need to take a close look at some factors that may impact your decision.

Generally, the fear is that one will buy a home now and the value will decline, making it a bad investment. Let's take a look at the interest rates. We've been seeing homebuyers getting as low as 4.5% interest rates on a 30 yr fixed loan-sometimes even lower on a 15 yr. If you were to buy a home today at $200,000 and a 4.5% interest rate over 30 years, you would pay a total of $364,814.42 with total interest at $164,814.42. If you decided to wait a couple years and buy the same house at $20,000 less (assuming values drop) at a 6.5% interest rate (which is still fantastic) your total bill will be $409,580.08 with a total interest at $229,580.08. For the same deal at 10% (rates have been higher) your total bill paid will be $568,668.66 with total interest at $388,668.66.

In this scenario you could be spending hundreds of thousands more, rather than saving $20K. That's the long term. For the short term, you're looking at a monthly payment difference of over $550! That's a very nice car payment...or 4 European vacations every year...or whatever makes you happy.

The point: No one will ever know that we "hit bottom" until we're on our way back up. Prices are low, interest rates are better than they've been in the history of the lending business. What are you waiting for?? I say, buy now.

I try to stay as relevant as possible, but I have had some requests from agents lately, regarding who I would recommend for their professional photos. It's quite simple, really. My wife, Kristen Self is the best photographer I have met. She excels in any fashion of portrait photography.

We recently had an "Agent Photo Day" and serviced 35 agents in 6 hours. If you are looking for a Gilbert photographer or anywhere in the East Valley, please feel free to contact her.

We have been working with Realtors for a long time in their pursuit of new business. Since short sales have overtaken roughly 50% of activity in the Phoenix market, many agents have decided to stop avoiding them, get educated and proactively market themselves for short sale listings. We and other title companies were instinctively providing lists of Notice of Trustee Sales (Arizona is a no Default Notice state), but found that lenders waiting too long to record these notices. For the most part, the general public sees the benefit of a short sale to be saving their credit. If they've missed payments for a year before a Realtor calls them, they are less likely to be a cooperative seller in a short sale because or their already devastated credit. And we all know an accomodating seller is the most important ingredient for a successful deal.

We needed to remedy this situation, so we found an outside marketing company to provide leads. For 3 months we paid thousands of dollars for what was claimed to be a late payer list. It contained names, addresses and phone numbers of borrowers who were 30 days late on their payments. The owner of the marketing firm told me, "this is proprietary information, and needs to be handled delicately". I thought I was sitting on a gold mine! After getting feedback on the demise of these leads, I disappointedly spoke with the marketing company owner. He had no answer for me, so I called someone I trust at First American Core Logic. He told me that it is next to impossible to get the data I was looking for and that this information I was receiving is likely "model data" and is sculpted from a prototype borrower in the area.

I have other issues than the fact that we were ripped off. I'm not even upset that we don't have the ability to provide a unique lead source. Here's my problem: Last year NAR released an astounding statistic. It said that 70-something percent of all foreclosures, nationwide, were never actively marketed as a short sale. This means there are STILL a lot of distressed homeowners who don't understand their options! How can we reach these people by the masses? At least in Arizona, we can't! Don't get me wrong...statistically speaking, you could blindly send out a mailer and 20% of the recipients will be in a perfect short sale scenario...but we (or someone) needs a way to pinpoint these borrowers and explain the advantage of foreclosure alternatives. I think this needs to be presented to the State...Your thoughts?

We've all seen the guys that enjoy a 30% (or better) marketshare by consistently involving themselves in community activities, sending out newsletters and more. Farming a community is costly, and capturing marketshare in a saturated neighbiorhood can be a difficult feat. Recipe postcards aren't as effective as they used to be (did they ever work?) and I haven't seen a succesful "Just Listed" campaign in a while.

Just having a nice presentation, useful data and the title "neighborhood specialist" may not be enough to become the go-to-agent in your community. However, organizing an event that creates more opportunities to meet the neighbors may be a huge step in accomplishing this goal. The holidays are approaching and many will be cleaning house to get rid of old clothes, toys and other unwanted items. A community garage sale could be just the event to establish yourself.

What does this entail? In a postcard or newsletter, you advertise the event to homeowners in the neighborhood, with the date and time. Let them know that you will be posting a big ad in the newspaper and your website (pitch the site) to generate buyers for their "treasures". The homeowners don't have to worry about signage, as you'll take care of every outlet in the subdivision. (It may be best to put signs out at the beginning of the week to remind the homwowners". Finally, on the morning of the event, you can walk the neighborhood and see all the participating families. This is not only your chance to meet the people that read what you are putting out there, but introduce yourself as the Realtor who actually provided something of value. This is something I've been a part of, and it actually works!

In Arizona, the retirement scene is a great place to be if you're a Realtor. As I've mentioned in previous posts, these buyers generally come with cash, so they don't care what the interest rates are. The exchange rate is another story. Canadians are a big source of these buyers. How do we find them? Let's take a closer look.

We close a lot of Canadian deals, and find it to be rare that we pay a referral fee to the buyers' Canadian agent, so I think we can rule out tracking down Canadian Realtors as a source of referrals, for the most part. There are some associations that are madeup primarily of Canadians, but they're difficult to tap into, especially if you're a Yankee. Advertising your listings in a Canadian publication can be dreadfully expensive.

So, what do Canadians have in common? A lot of them already own property in the United States! That's right, good old tax records. Our tax website (although MLS tax site is better) allows a user to export raw data. In minutes, you can have a huge list of every property owner that lives in Canada, or Minnetonka, Minnesota...or anywhere else. You can search for properties located in a specific subdivision, owned by people in other parts of the world. And these current owners are involved in nearly half the retirement business we work with. This data can be imported right back in to a mailing for a quick direct mail campaign! Let me know if you'd like help with this, I'm happy to assist you.